The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

I’m going back to work.

I know! That is about how I feel too, Alice. Surprised, anxious, off kilter, but mostly excited. I put the feelers out to a former boss over a month ago to keep me in mind for part time evening work, and she called me today with a full time offer that it would be stupid to turn down. I will be making more a month then Tom does right now, so, instead of juggling our schedules, hiring childcare, and worrying that our kids are suffering, he’s going to quit his job and be the stay at home parent, working occasional evenings at his catering job. We can roll our current benefits over to this job, I will have paid vacation days, and since it is at the university, in six months I will be eligible for the tuition waver, and can work on my Masters degree for $5 a credit. Ive done the job before, it’s with the group that put me through school (so I know the program), my boss is wonderful….

But I won’t be home with my girls.

This is the right thing to do – for our family, for our finances, for my education and career, for so many reasons.

But I won’t be home with my girls.

And that is already breaking my heart.

First:

Second: I finally watched/listened to the “Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch today, after a friend emailed me with a “:( He passed away” and I had no idea who she was linking to. It’s over an hour, so I turned it on while washing dishes, thinking I would just listen to it, but within 15 minutes I was sitting and watching, engrossed. I cant recommend it enough if you haven’t seen it.

I’ve been uninspired lately, to the point that I’ve been avoiding my craft room all together. Every time I walk into it, I just feel the creative energy drain right out of my toes. Tom cleaned and reorganized my craft room for me this week (which earned him five hundred and two patience points, let me tell ya) but still, it is just overwhelming. Instead, I’ve been sitting on the couch watching old DVR’ed Daily Shows and ripping pages out of 5 years worth of Martha Stewart Magazines and the odd Pottery Barn catalogue.  I’ve been trying to focus on colors and design more then ‘projects’, and taping them all into this little book I have been carrying around for over a year now. I used to fill up a small book like this in a month with poems. I’m trying not to think about that. Look at all the pretty colors.

(Denise, this is your warning. Apparently all I can write lately is things that make me all weepy, so get your hankie ready.)

I went to bed mad last night. Angry. Pissed off. The reason seems trivial by the light of day, but I didn’t care – I was mad, and I wanted to be mad, because I was hurt and embarrassed and sometimes it just feels good to blame someone else for things you can’t change. It was late, and Alice was curled into my chest, done nursing but clingy enough that I knew I wasn’t going to have any luck scooting her into her own space. And this just felt like too much. It was all just too much. And like Design Star Micheal, I just wanted my mom.

The thing about complaining about your husband, or your kids, is that you have to have the right audience. They have to know how fiercely you love them, and that even when you say “I just want to get in the car and drive and drive and drive” that you would never, ever leave. That you can be so angry with someone and still be devoted to them. That the right thing to say is “Take a deep breath, tomorrow you will be able to talk to him about this calmly. It’s going to be okay” not “Wow, what scum!” I don’t complain about Tom very often because I know what it is like to read someone’s rant and assume that their relationship is flawed to the point of failing – we make judgments based on what we see, and blogs are not fair in that way. So, I didn’t want to come here and vent, I didn’t want to call a friend at 11pm, I didn’t want to talk it out. I just wanted  my mom.

(My mom around my age, with my older sister and I)

And then comes the part that will sound hokey, that they reasonable, light of day Ivory smirks at. Because laying there, bitter that my husband said he was sorry before I was done being mad, angry that my infant daughter wanted to lay next to me all night, just pissed off that my mom was dead, the thought “Take comfort in your children, they are what you will be most proud of in your life” came to me, and it wasn’t my thought. How do I explain this without sounding like I want to be on Montel? It was a fully formed sentence, that I did not understand until I said it outloud. I want to brush it aside, claim that I had thought this before and it was just coming back to me, but… it just wasn’t my thought. It was like hearing a friend over a bad telephone wire – you caught the pieces of the sentence, strung them together, and then decoded it. And then you lay, crying, curled around your tiny daughter, thankful and sure.

Take it as you will – I’m not entirely sure what to think about it myself – but it was a moment I couldn’t let go without noting. In the months after my mom died, I would find feathers in the oddest places – in my closed car, in a shoe, between the pages of a library book. I took comfort in these little tokens, half admitting to myself that I hoped they were from my mother, half sure I was schizophrenic for even entertaining the idea. That is where I am today. Perhaps if I had a defined faith, I would be able to fit this experience within the realm of normal, but I don’t, and I can’t. So I’m not over thinking it – I needed that advice last night, and I got it. Perhaps you need to hear it too. Perhaps I will fully understand it in 50 years.

Spring cleaning is in full effect around here, and the girl’s rooms were the first rooms under attack. I’m a huge fan of “A place for everything, everything in it’s place” and until we reorganized everything, nothing had a place, other than “in the toybox”. Let’s hope we can keep it up.
My camera has a setting that lets you take panoramas, but they obviously warp the photos a bit to get them to stitch together. Click over to Flickr to see details, and all the little notes.

Ella’s room

Alice’s/Diaper/Play Room

Again, no before pictures, because, well, they were embarrassing.

Ha, just to clear up something in the comments: Denise, the first poster said “Happy Birthday to your mom. I think you need to have an *overly emotional pregnant woman warning* on your posts…” to which everyone else said “Wait, you’re pregnant?” And the answer to that is decidedly Noooooooo, Denise is pregnant, not me! And I can say this with authority since I’ve taken 2 pregnancy tests this week. As much as I love breastfeeding (and won’t be stopping any time soon) I do miss the monthly reminder that I can have a glass of wine without the nagging feeling that I’m bathing a fetus in merlot.

We’re not planning on adding a third to the brood right now, and not making a decision about how to avoid pregnancy is a decision to get pregnant for us. Ella was conceived within a month of Tom and I being *ahem* physical (even though I was on the pill, and we used other protection). With Alice we were on the fence, and by the time we decided to wait she was already on her way (from the first fertile cycle I had!) (We were also still on the Mini-pill, knowing that it had a higher fail rate (but didn’t mess with breastfeeding) but again – no action on that knowledge was action.)

So, yeah. We’re apparently on the “hyperfertile” end of the spectrum, and hormonal birth control isn’t working for us. A friend of mine worked in the pharmaceutical industry for years, and explained to me that people metabolize medications differently, and this is why some cancer drugs work for some people, and other people have to try one after another to find one that their body can break down and use. Logically, this can apply to birth control also, and short of taking the pill and having my blood drawn hourly to see if my hormone levels are on target, there is no way to be sure that my body isn’t using up the medication at hour 22, and letting an egg slip by. And while both my girls are blessings, and I classify them as “happy surprises” not “mistakes”, I’m not sure how many more “happy surprises” my nerves can take right now.

Of course, there are a thousand other options when it comes to birth control, but there just isn’t a right fit for us. I’m not comfortable with an IUD (hormonal or copper, it’s the ‘something inside me all the time oh my god’ factor that makes me all panicky), spermicides make my vag angry (so diaphragms and caps are out), we’re not interested in sterilization, and while condoms are the lesser of all evils, they are not ideal.

So, I’m spitting on a slide and looking for ferns every morning. I’m taking my temp, making note of mucus (still with me?) and daily trying to decide if I am cranky and emotional because I am so.very.tired, or if it’s PMS. Or, like this week when I cried while watching Wipeout, if I am pregnant. Which I’m not ya’ll.

Edited to add: Aww, Mr Bush, thank you for trying to make my decision so much easier by labeling various forms of birth control “abortions” so that they would not be so tempting to little ol’ me who can’t think for herself!

I just took the last picture for a photo-day-in-the-life of today, (though it will be a few days before I manage to edit them and put them together with witty captions,) but I have to ask:

Is it strange to have a birthday party for your dead mother? Yes?

Well then, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t get her any balloons, because that would have been downright creepy.

(Happy 49th Mom. I wish you could have heard Ella singing to you today, though if you are anywhere in this universe, I’m sure you at least caught the high notes. )

You know how sometimes, when you are on the fence about a decision, if you just quit thinking about it something will come along and make the decision for you?

I think God/fate/the cosmos want me to homeschool. Otherwise, when I pulled up to the yardsale of thousands of books about homeschooling, God wouldn’t have made everything FREE. I told myself I would only come home with one small bin of books, but somehow ended up with 4 stacks of books, two carts of children’s craft supplies, a box of paints, and another box (still out in the car) full of math puzzles. I pushed $10 into the woman’s hand as we were leaving, but she made me promise to come back tomorrow and pick up everything else, when I have more room in my van. She even offered to pack it up and save it for me, but I told her that it was okay, I would take my chances.

But of all the treasures I came home with today, the most important is this little Disney Princess dinner set. Not because they are expensive, or rare, but because of who they used to belong to. My friend N handed them to me as we were leaving her house today, knowing that Ella would love them, and I cried as I drove away. They belonged to a little girl I never got to meet, but who I think about a lot. Their story is not mine to tell, but we miss her, and her little brother, and even those of us who never got to hear their laughter know were are poorer for not having them in our lives. A part of me wants to put these little plates up on a high shelf where no one can touch them, but no. N could have done that, and no one would have blamed her, but she wanted Ella to enjoy them. And based on how hard it was to get a picture of all three pieces without Ella swiping one and yelling “MY PRINCESS PLATE! I NEED IT!” I think she will.

Houston, we have a tooth.

If I were a good mom, I would be able to pull out Ella’s tooth chart and see if she also got her lower right front tooth first, but instead I would have to go through the archives of two blogs and 3 years of random photosharing sites (goodness I need to consolidate those) to figure it out, and well, we all know that is not going to happen tonight. That would take away from my precious “googling for images of baby sharks” time. Priorities, people.

After months of me sighing dramatically every time we walked by our front flowerbeds, Tom spent 6 hours yesterday digging out the waist high weeds, laying down weedblocker, putting in edging stones, and dumping bark on top. I’ve tried to tackle the mess before, but having an infant and a toddler in the front yard (which borders a rather busy street) with me while trying to do manual labor is just asking to lose my damn mind.

I didn’t take a real before picture, but take my word for it: it was bad. We plan to put in flowers this week, and also put up trellises with some sort of climbing vine (sweet peas?) to mask the ramp. What finally motivated Tom was the idea of selling the house so that we could move closer to a job opportunity that yesterday was 98% his. Aaaaand then of course today it fell through the cracks. *Dramatic sigh* At least I got a nice flowerbed out of it, right?